Manfredo Tafuri

Chosen among Otília Arantes’s many lectures, classes, and interviews about Manfredo Tafuri, the two lectures in this book were given during two academic events at the University of São Paulo (USP): the first one is a tribute to the architect, historian, and critic and was given shortly after his death at a seminar on City History at the São Carlos campus; and the second one was given twenty years later, in February 2015, at an international seminar called “Manfredo Tafuri, his readers and their readings” at the School of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU). Both were mainly focused on the book Progetto e Utopia: Architettura e Sviluppo Capitalistico. In the first lecture, “A Arquitetura da Cidade: um ponto de vista” (City Architecture: A point of view), after contextualizing the author within the Architecture and Urban studies conducted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, Arantes makes a thorough analysis of the book, focusing on its diagnosis about the exhaustion of the Modern Movement, which was becoming increasingly linked, according to Tafuri, to the city as a productive structure, consequently reduced to an “operational mechanism”, while the “ideology of planning” was reduced to a “regressive utopia”. It also presents some considerations on the later so-called postmodernist expressions, and Tafuri’s criticism of it leads him to propose, as an alternative to the dominant historicism, a “niilismo compiuto”. The interpretation of this concept, then taken as an expression of a “paralyzing pessimism”, was reviewed two decades later, at the end of the second lecture, with a reading (that Arantes considered fairer) that viewed it as a natural consequence of a “philosophy of negation”. This is the main topic of “A dialética negativa de Manfredo Tafuri” (The negative dialectics of Manfredo Tafuri), where Arantes aims to retrace, in a dialogue with Asor Rosa, Tafuri’s Marxist roots, his dialectical point of view (only suggested in the first lecture)—more precisely, his participation in the Italian Marxist tradition and how it was influenced, at least from a certain moment, by a school of thought that began to spread in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the academic field): the critical theory of the Frankfurt School—without overlooking other references that make up what she calls “heterodox Marxism”, or “healthy eclecticism”, in Tafuri’s “non-linear” thinking.

The video of the second conference can be accessed by clicking on the button below the download links for the ebooks.

Keywords: Vanguards, Metropolis, Modern Movement, Ideology of Planning, Utopia, Antolini, Laugier, Corbusier, Bauhaus, Italian Architecture, Nihilism, Semiology, Structuralism, Nietzsche, Foucault, Genealogical Method, Ginzburg, Asor Rosa, Marxism, Dialectics, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht